It had only been a couple of days since the event with Claudia and Dade was still feeling a little shaken. Remington and Drew had been making sure that he was never alone unless he wanted to be, which helped him feel better, and Rose had made it clear she was absolutely on his side. She had warned him about Claudia to begin with, and Dade wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that she had threatened Connor afterwards because he hadn’t even tried to come close to Dade. He was pretty sure it hadn’t died down entirely with Connor though, and the threat of Claudia was still there, so Dade definitely wasn’t feeling safe. Plus he had detention every single night with the caretaker, which totally sucked. Well, Ms. Liang was actually pretty nice but he still didn’t want to be doing detention with her.

But he had some time before detention and it was after classes and he’d asked for some space from Drew and Remington, and so Dade had headed to the theater, looking for Madeleine. It made him feel a little queasy and anxious, but he liked hanging out with Madeleine, even though she was a lot younger than him. He thought maybe he would have been okay as an older sibling, had he been given the chance. But playing pretend with Madeleine was fun, and as long as he didn’t think about it too hard, he liked that she called him by his ‘princess name’ - Daisy. It was a name Dade liked a lot, and he had experimented with different middle names to go with his princess name. He was currently trying “Daisy Ophelia” (because all princesses had more than one name) but had also tried “Daisy Esmeralda” and “Daisy Aurora”. He wasn’t sure which one he liked the most yet. He would probably ask Madeleine which one she thought was the best princess name.

Madeleine was likely to be in the theater somewhere, so that was where Dade went. He expected to see Madeleine in the theater and sometimes he saw other people in the theater (at which point he usually left). But what he wasn’t expecting when he walked into a theater and skulked past the back seats was his sister’s boyfriend, walking around the stage with a click-click-click wearing high heels. Then Emmett looked at Dade. Dade looked at Emmett.

”Yeah, this is exactly what it looks like.”

Dade had absolutely no idea what it looked like. He knew that Emmett was friends with Holland, but he didn’t know that Emmett wore high heels like Holland. Honestly, Dade almost never noticed Emmett. He wasn’t very noticable. But was Emmett a nonbinary like Holland too? Dade hadn’t known that. And what did that make Rose? He sidled closer to the stage. He had limited experience with high heels. Dade wasn’t very good at them and they were conspicuous enough that he felt uncomfortable.

Click, click, click . Walking in high heels was, Emmett was surprised to discover, not that bad. Actually, it was pretty fun. He’d been kinda thinking about it ever since he’d started going to drag... more

Emmett grinned at the compliment. “Thanks!” he said cheerily. “Yeah, they definitely helped me get started. I still feel kind of like a weird baby gazelle or something, but I’m getting better.” There ... more